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lamprey

UK/ˈlæm.pɹi/US/ˈlæm.pɹi/
nounC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Other forms: lampreys

A lamprey is an eel-like fish that fastens onto other fish. A sea lamprey.

It has no jaws and a mouth like a sucker full of rings of teeth. A king of England is said to have died of a surfeit of lampreys, which is the one thing everybody knows about them.

Tiit Hunt · CC BY-SA 3.0

Definitions of lamprey

  1. 1nounlampreyAn eel-like fish that fastens onto other fish.C2

    “The lamprey had been attached for weeks and the fish survived.”

lamprey is a fish.

Where it comes from

Medieval Latin lampreda may come from lambere, to lick, plus petra, a rock.

  1. Latin

    lampetra — lamprey

  2. Medieval Latin

    lampreda

  3. Old French

    lampreie

  4. Middle English

    laumprei

  5. English, today

    lamprey

Built from

  • lambō · Latin — to lick, lap
  • petra · Latin — stone, rock

From Middle English laumprei, from Old French lampreie (modern lamproie), from Medieval Latin lampreda, possibly alteration of Latin lampetra (“lamprey”), whose further origin is unknown, though it is traditionally thought to be a combination of lambō (“to lick, lap”) + petra (“stone, rock”). a doublet of limpet, which derives from -.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

lamprey in the wild

  • Petromyzontidae are a family of lampreys native to the Northern Hemisphere, comprising the vast majority of living lampreys.

    Petromyzontidae

  • USS Lamprey, a Balao-class submarine, was a ship of the United States Navy named for the lamprey, any of certain eel-like aquatic vertebrates.

    USS Lamprey

  • The sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) is a parasitic lamprey native to the Northern Hemisphere.

    Sea lamprey

  • The brook lamprey (Lampetra planeri), also known as the European brook lamprey and the western brook lamprey, is a small European lamprey species that exclusively inhabits freshwater environments.

    Brook lamprey

  • The species is related to, but distinct from, the North American western brook lamprey (Lampetra richardsoni).

    Brook lamprey

1 / 3

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the petra family

petrified

lamprey — used too rare to measure · point at the bar for the others